Multilevel Modeling of Gaze From Listeners With Hearing Loss Following a Realistic Conversation

Martha M. Shiell*, Johannes Zaar, Jeppe Høy-Christensen, Martin A. Skoglund, Gitte Keidser, Sergi Rotger-Griful

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

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Abstract

Purpose: There is a need for tools to study real-world communication abilities in people with hearing loss. We outline a potential method for this that analyzes gaze and use it to answer the question of when and how much listeners with hearing loss look toward a new talker in a conversation. 

Method: Twenty-two older adults with hearing loss followed a prerecorded two-person audiovisual conversation in the presence of babble noise. We compared their eye-gaze direction to the conversation in two multilevel logistic regression (MLR) analyses. First, we split the conversation into events classified by the number of active talkers within a turn or a transition, and we tested if these predicted the listener’s gaze. Second, we mapped the odds that a listener gazed toward a new talker over time during a conversation transition. 

Results: We found no evidence that our conversation events predicted changes in the listener’s gaze, but the listener’s gaze toward the new talker during a silence-transition was predicted by time: The odds of looking at the new talker increased in an s-shaped curve from at least 0.4 s before to 1 s after the onset of the new talker’s speech. A comparison of models with different random effects indicated that more variance was explained by differences between individual conversation events than by differences between individual listeners. 

Conclusions: MLR modeling of eye-gaze during talker transitions is a promising approach to study a listener’s perception of realistic conversation. Our experience provides insight to guide future research with this method.

Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
Volume66
Issue number11
Pages (from-to)4575-4589
ISSN1092-4388
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

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